Yarra Valley Caviar

‘Life is short. Eat some caviar.’ But the fish’s life need not be so brief

How Yarra Valley Caviar is scaling fish roe, one egg at a time. Nick Gorman doesn’t know why caviar sales are soaring. “I’m not sure if people have figured that: ‘Life’s short. Just eat some caviar’.” Whatever, his Yarra Valley Caviar has grown from four tonnes of fish eggs a year in 2006 when he first […]

Amanda Healy closing the gap

There’s no bank of mum and dad for First Nations kids  

Amanda Healy is an indigenous woman who employs 850 people at her engineering business. And she’s bent on straightening out what’s crooked in the land of opportunity. Amanda Healy was working up near the Arctic Circle, doing human resources for BHP as they built Canada’s first diamond mine when she faced a problem no male […]

The Brisbane schoolmates who built a $3 billion edtech juggernaut

How a bunch of school friends built a $3-billion company in Brisbane’s Logan district. Andrew Barnes and Vu Tran were in high school and needed a job. They could have stacked shelves at Coles for $15 an hour. Instead, they started a software business and “made a dollar an hour”.   Watching on in the year […]

Glenglassaugh whisky and oyster tasting

Immerse yourself in whisky and oysters

When an old coastal highland distillery wanted to relaunch in Australia, it went for a full “immersive” experience. In case you didn’t know, whisky and oysters are a thing. So when an old distillery by the North Sea wanted to relaunch its single malts in Australia, what better way than to get aficionados into waders […]

How to tell if it’s intuition or ego driving your decisions?

Jacinta McDonell took on the Australian licence of US gym franchise Anytime Fitness in 2008. It had scaled to 425 clubs by the time she exited in 2018. She now focuses on leadership training and helping founders. She shared her key lessons at the Forbes Australia Leadership Forum. The first key to success that Jacinta […]

The surprising Aussie tech hubs you’ve never heard of

A CSIRO report examining the geography of digital businesses has revealed 96 tech clusters spread across the country – in sometimes surprising places. Key Takeaways Eight Mile Plains in Brisbane’s south came up bright red when CSIRO principal research consultant Stefan Hajkowicz plugged in the numbers for the concentration of tech jobs in Australia, trying […]

The Aussie Korean pear juice on its way to tackle America’s hangover

The first container of Bae’s hangover prevention juice is crossing the ocean bound for New York after a $500,000 injection from Honan Capital allowed the start-up to launch its overseas ambitions. Sumin Do took the boyfriend she’d met on Tinder, Tim O’Sullivan, back home to South Korea for the local version of Thanksgiving, Chuseok, in […]

Deep-tech VC raises $450m for a fund with an ‘unfair advantage’

There’s a new bucket of VC money in town, but the cash from Main Sequence’s Fund 3 won’t be going to any old start-up. Key Takeaways “If you could build it in a weekend in your garage, it’s probably not something we’re investing in,” says Mike Zimmerman, co-founder of the “deep-tech” venture fund. “The companies […]